The shape of the universe
Across the eight sectors we track, 2,302 companies make up the universe. Breadth is heavily concentrated at the top: Technology leads with 621 names (~27%), followed by Industrials (441), Healthcare (381) and Basic Materials (326). Those four sectors alone hold about 77% of every ticker we follow. The tail is comparatively thin — Consumer Cyclical (166), Financials (139), Energy (139) and Communication Services (89) together make up the remaining quarter.
That distribution matters. A universe this Technology- and Industrials-weighted will move with the fortunes of chipmakers, software, and capital-goods cycles far more than its headline diversity suggests.
Familiar giants, unfamiliar tickers
The sample names read like two lists stitched together. On one side sit the household megacaps: AAPL, MSFT and NVDA anchor Technology; JNJ, UNH and ABBV head Healthcare; AMZN and TSLA lead Consumer Cyclical; GOOGL, META and NFLX define Communication Services; BRK.B, JPM, V and MA stand for Financials.
On the other side is a long, genuinely global tail — Xiamen Solex and Arch Meter in Industrials, Shanghai Xiao Fang in Healthcare, China XLX Fert and Galantas Gold in Basic Materials, Tencent and Alibaba in the consumer and communication names. This is not a US-large-cap index dressed up; it reaches into Hong Kong, Shanghai, Toronto, Sydney, Seoul and beyond.
A caution on the reported weights
Here the data invites a raised eyebrow. Ranked by reported total market cap, the order inverts the headcount story: Financials tops the list at roughly $159T, Energy at ~$107T, and Basic Materials at ~$47T, while Technology — the largest by count — shows only ~$22.7T and Consumer Cyclical, home to Amazon and Tesla, just ~$0.58T.
Those figures do not reconcile with either the company counts or reality; the global equity market is nowhere near the tens of trillions attributed to Basic Materials or Financials here. The sample names hint at why: dual and cross-listings appear repeatedly — NVO.TO alongside NVO.AX, GAL.V alongside GAL.L, OBE alongside OBE.TO, GOOGL alongside GOOG, and two Frankfurt/Xetra Tesla lines. Double-counting, currency mismatches, or share-class aggregation are the likeliest culprits. Treat the market-cap column as a data-quality flag, not an allocation signal.
What an investor might watch
Three things follow. First, concentration risk by count: a Technology stumble ripples across more than a quarter of the universe. Second, the international tail: the non-US names carry FX and listing-venue nuance that the megacaps do not. Third — and most immediately actionable for anyone building on this data — reconcile the market-cap aggregates before trusting any weight-based view. Breadth here is real and global; the reported weights are not yet ready to lean on.